Savage is equal parts inspired by the Conan stories by Robert E. Howard, my fascination with Zelda II (yes, yes, I know - the black sheep of the Zelda family), other games of its ilk (like Gargoyle's Quest) and a healthy dose of general barbarian fetishism.

The final product will (hopefully) include a varied, somewhat open world to explore, an interesting little tale filled with machismo, magic and muscles, day/night cycle, overworld hunting/tracking, lots of action/platforming, fun melee system and some mild RPG elements (item use, leveling up, gear, crafting and the like).

GameMaker games and Windows 10 seem to be butting heads on certain systems. If your display goes black and then white (showing nothing and no response from Savage) when starting the game in Fullscreen, here's what seems to fix the issue.

TO FIX:

RIGHT CLICK on the Savage .exe and open Properties and navigate to the Compatibility tab. CHECK the box under Settings labeled "Disable fullscreen optimizations". Click APPLY.

Doing this seems to have worked for the user that reported it (THANK YOU Gallus!).

I come to you now at the turn of the tide... Or, with a big fat update. This is probably the biggest update I have put out of the game as far as new features and content go. But before we dig in and get our hands (or blades) good and filthy, there are a couple new Savage related things I'd like to point out:

Let's Finish SAVAGE

Going forward, every Friday at 1pm Central, I will be doing a weekly wrap up show on my Twitch channel called "Let's Finish Savage" that will coincide with a weekly game update (big or small, whatever gets done and is ready for deployment that week). I'll go over new content added, bugs fixed, tweaks and polish, and ANYTHING and EVERYTHING you can expect in these weekly builds. The plan is to also cover any future plans and roadmaps (i.e. what you can expect in following updates and builds), followed up by some Q and A, provided anyone watching has any questions!

Feel free to also hop into the Discord to keep up with any and all news posts related to Savage, including livestream announcements. There are also a couple handy channels you can use to give me feedback, report bugs, or just chew the fat about the game:

OK! With those out of the way, let's dig into this shiny (and broken) new build.

New Friends

A big batch of new NPCs and characters have been added into the game, each with their own personalities, tasks and animations. Some of them vendor new items! Some will be a trigger for new events and story elements. In addition, new rooms and buildings have been added to Gussek, the border village you first see when exiting the Mining Prison.

Slay them ALL

One of the biggest features I've added to the game is the ability to actively attack ANY NPC in the game. Doing so will make them permanently hostile to you and they will then behave like an enemy object to you until slain.

Doing this has consequences, of course. Now that you've met them, kill them.

Eat, Drink, and be Careful

You used to be able to totally spam healing items, regardless of your player state. NO LONGER.

You will now have to find a safe moment or location to STOP and eat meat, drink potions etc.

It Wants to Kill You

The world is a dangerous place, and it's gotten worse. A whole slew of new and terrible things can happen to you in the form of Status Ailments.

These include Burning, Paralysis, Poison and becoming Cursed. But worry not! With every new deadly affliction comes a remedy.

In addition to the new status ailments, you can no longer swim completely submerged indefinitely. You run the risk of drowning if you stay in the depths for too long.

In addition to using an item like the Balm to mitigate Burning, jumping in the water (as well as being out in the rain or snow) can put the fire out.

You Are Being Hunted

Dying results in you dropping your hard earned Essence and any matured Essence Orbs that can later be reclaimed by returning to the site of your death. BUT - some interesting things can and will happen on the place of your death surrounding your dropped Essence. Depending on your Favor stat, things can go South pretty quickly...

The number of times you've died and dropped Essence can cause said Essence to go wild, eventually transforming into a shadowy Twisted Self - an entity without any direction other than your demise.

Dying and dropping Essence within a randomly generated encounter on the Overworld Map will LOCK IN the encounter, allowing you to run through it again and attempt to regain your dropped Essence.

If slain by the Twisted Self, the plan going forward is to have him persue you in various locations and on the world map until one of you lies dead.

CUNNING!

A brand new third Major Stat called Cunning has been added to character advancement!

In addition, the level up and character sheet has had a major overhaul (visually and mechanically), allowing you to see all of the sub stats that are affected by leveling up your Major Stats.

Everything Else

In addition to some of these more dense features, there are a whole bunch of other changes, improvements and bug fixes to list.

FEATURES and NEW STUFF

Added weather and region specific dynamic background tile layers

Added functionality to pressure plates

Added new item sprite and description for the Walljump item

Added new "shard" themed props and assets

Added exciting, horrible and frustrating new hazards, like beams and lasers

Added streams of lava and large bodies of lava

Added new "Slave Garb" armor set, including new pieces to allow me to make more visually different armor sets

New status ailments: Drowning, Burning, Poison, Paralysis, Curse

New status ailments "bars" that appear above the player

New enemy healthbars

Added Leeches (cures Poison)

Added Crogue Needles (cures Paralysis and mitigates being grabbed)

Added Soothing Balm (cures Burning)

Added God Bone (removes Curse)

Added several new NPCs

New rooms and buildings in Gussek, the border village

ALL NPCs can now be attacked and/or made hostile, and as a result, can be killed New NPC related items

New lock and key system for "background" doors

New shortcut within Devil's Shade, both in the actual level and outside on the overworld map

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So - I have shamelessly copied/pasted the following from my ​Game Jolt page (because, no sleep for a billion hours!! :D ) - I made it! I managed to...

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The new build looks awesome. It's really neat to see all of the extra story you're putty into it.

One question about the build though. I got to the part where all the villagers are mining and there is an iron door and gold door near by. Watching your playthrough it seemed like this was where I can talk to them and receive a pick axe. However for some reason I can't interact with anyone or with the doors even though I have iron keys.

Might just be a big on my system or perhaps I'm totally brain dead and am just missing something :)

Oh crap! Sorry for the late reply -- IndieDB doesn't alert me to new comments (every blue moon the notification system decides to work).

The NPC dialogue and interactions are coming in the next patch -- as of now they aren't implemented yet and you do not need the pickaxe to progress. If you go to the room immediately to the left of the slaves, one of the crates will contain an iron key that you can use to get into the iron key door.

From there, the rest of the demo is accessible.

Of course, you can always wait til the patch is deployed to engage in conversations, the new quests, etc.

Really good stuff so far! It's quite tough but really satisfying and it looks and controls brilliantly.

If you don't mind me saying though, the sound design and music style doesn't quite seem to fit. Visually, it looks like a Super Nintendo game and the chiptunes and simple synthesized sounds feel a bit out of place next to that kind of visual fidelity. The melodies and such are really cool, but I think they'd fit better played by orchestral instruments. Preferably using less realistic/cheaper sounding VSTs to capture that early 90s SNES sound. The walking sounds can be a bit loud as well, but it's an alpha so I'm guessing sound levels are really not a priority right now!

Just my two cents anyway, really looking forward to playing this in full!

Thanks Scrabbit! Yeah, I have yet to do a real audio pass on everything (those pesky footstep noises included) -- and the music will get a bit of a makeover as well. Won't be quite the synthesized midi-esque symphonic stuff of, say, the SNES, but it will sound more high fidelity than straight up NES chiptunes. The stuff in the game right now is mostly place holder.

This is all stuff on the todo list to be tackled once the game is nearly complete.

Hello
I played the first alpha version and the latest version. I noticed that in the first version, you could move faster on the map by holding "A" and moving with the arrow keys. In the last version, it doesn't work anymore. Anyway, i love the concept of the game. Awesome graphics and gameplay, but there's one thing i noticed... Wooden Club does almost the same damage as the sword, but the club hits a lot faster than the sword.

Good grief - sorry for the late reply. IndieDB refuses to alert me to comments.

Are you referring to Early Access? I want to avoid releasing the game in that way. I don't think a game like this would do well in a retail system like that, since it's not a "living" game - i.e., procedurally generated with tons of modular elements added over time each year, and all that.

It would be like playing Super Mario Bros. 3 or something, where like, every month a new zone or handful of levels was added.